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Brandon Butler writes: "OpenStack has no shortage of corporate backers. Rackspace, Red Hat, IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco and many others have hopped on board. But many wonder, after four years, shouldn't there be more end users by this point? 'OpenStack backers say this progression is completely normal. Repeating an analogy many have made, Paul Cormier, president of products and technology for Red Hat, says OpenStack’s development is just like the process of building up Linux. This time the transition to a cloud-based architecture is an even bigger technological transformation than replacing proprietary operating systems with Linux. "It’s where Linux was in the beginning," he says about OpenStack's current status. "Linux was around for a while before it really got adopted in the enterprise. OpenStack is going through the same process right now."'"

The only people with the business case to use cloud infrastructure are the corporate backers themselves. SMB have no reason to chase clouds and mid-level B2B computing crap gets outsourced anyway.

Yeah, because your typical SMB out there really want to use time and resources on managing their own IT systems, administrating their own servers and perform regular updates and security patching. It's not like they really want to focus on something else.. I know it is popular to make fun of the cloud hype on Slashdot, but IT as a managed services has real value especially for SMB (not at least compared to a very typical SMB scenario of the IT role being filled part time by the guy in the firm that knows mo

That's sort of like saying that everyone should be riding the bus because it's too resource-intensive to maintain a scooter or to have it serviced.

If all the software that those SMBs need to run worked in a cloud environment with no issues, then it would make sense.

Most of those small businesses, especially not-for-profits, can't spend as much on reliable bandwidth and network infrastructure as they'd need to in order to leverage a cloud solution and not face maddening slowdowns in ordinary workflows.

As a IT manager of a 1000 user mid tier business, The only thing we could do in the cloud was Email and office docs.Neither os which tied into our document management solution that was a business requirement, so using cloud apps was not appropriate for them, nor for the other 200 or so productivity apps we use.

putting the Servers in the cloud as virts is possible. but 2 times the cost of physicals, and I still have to manage them there anyway:-).

It's more like, everyone should performance tune their engine's timings themselves, instead of paying a professional to do it. Datacenters are not cheap to design correctly. With "the cloud", you pay for characteristics, instead of concerning yourself on how it's implemented. This isn't perfect, but it works "good enough" and quite a bit better than what many can do on their own.

You still have to admin your servers, even if they're in the cloud. Just not deal with hardware issues.

No, you rent the complete solution as a service -- Office365, Salesforce, etc. I work in a 100 person 1.5 IT guy company that have moved almost all our IT (rest soon to go) to rented services like these, and the business is quite happy about this vs. the hassle of running our own IT.

Of course IT shops need direct access to their IT. But most shops are anything from ice cream parlors to carpenters. The prototypical SMB. They don't need their IT as we do. They need it like we need electricity or running water. Pretty much standard, but reliable.

I was under the impression that the main use for OpenCloud and similar was medium-sized businesses: those who need more than one server, but not a complete datacenter. It's easy to set up a small number of machines running the same hypervisor and use OpenCloud to roll out virtual servers for each department that needs them. If you want to move some of them off-site, then you can use the same infrastructure to migrate them to another of your offices or to someone else's datacenter.

OpenStack is more about virtualisation than anything else. Its potential usefulness for "cloud" service providers is one example, but it's probably of more interest to large organisations looking to consolidate their own in-house IT services. As with many "open" technologies, the realities aren't quite as simple as the article here suggests, though.

It's certainly true that proprietary high-end networking gear and virtualisation software can be expensive. In that respect, alternatives like OpenStack are potentially disruptive.

On the other hand, ask anyone who's actually had to administer an OpenStack system how they feel about it, and the response might be a string of curse words that would make your mother blush. This is a technology (or more accurately, a loosely connected family of technologies) still very much in its infancy, and sometimes it shows.

Also, just because big name brands are keen to be associated with the shiny new buzzword, don't mistake that for sincere support. OpenStack poses a direct threat to the established business model of some of those networking giants, and just like everyone else, the executives at those businesses are wondering where the industry is going next and how to look like you're playing nicely while really still trying to optimise your own financial position.

On the other hand, ask anyone who's actually had to administer an OpenStack system how they feel about it, and the response might be a string of curse words that would make your mother blush. This is a technology (or more accurately, a loosely connected family of technologies) still very much in its infancy, and sometimes it shows.

+100

SMB here - We virtualised all our 6 servers and multiple test pc's onto a couple of grunty boxes. We looked at the cloud, but our net is to slow and unreliable (thanks Malcom Turnball for screwing the NBN).

Looked at OpenStack - a freaking nightmare to put together. Huge chain of dependencies and general flakyness. vSphere was too expensive if you wanted clustering, vmotion, replication etc. We eventually settled on proxmox - debian based using KVM, trivially easy to install and get running. Nice admin interface and basic backup facilities.

8 months on no real regrets, so sometimes regret not going with HyperV 2012.

If you're using OpenStack for general virtualisation I'd say you're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The OpenStack feature set shines when you actually need things like on-demand scaling, completely API driven infrastructure, instantiation of servers with lifetimes of minutes to hours, etc. To be used in the way it's designed for it pretty much requires applications written to function that way.

If you're just virtualizing traditional workloads you're better off with using RHEV or VmWare or some

OpenStack is more about virtualisation than anything else. Its potential usefulness for "cloud" service providers is one example, but it's probably of more interest to large organisations looking to consolidate their own in-house IT services.

I'm not sure that's true. From what I've read (but admittedly I haven't tried to implement OpenStack), it doesn't seem to offer any great virtualization capabilities compared with other hypervisors. It seems that the benefit of OpenStack comes from it being an easy way to deploy virtualization, storage, and compute nodes as a platform for development.

If I want to set up a single server with a hypervisor, would I set up OpenStack? If I had 5 servers that I wanted to set up as hypervisors, would OpenStack

Well if you're saying that virtualization is useful for IT departments, then yes, I'd certainly agree. If you said distributed/redundant virtualization would be useful for IT departments, I'd agree there too. For example, I would love to be able to do the following quickly, easily, and with FOSS: Set up multiple provide datacenters in different locations, each with a couple of computers that can serve as hosts and some form of mass storage, and link them all together as some kind of cluster for virtualiza

OpenStack is more about managing virtual servers compared to being about virtualization. OpenStack needs a hypervisor, there is no function for that in the code. Just clarifying here that OpenStack is a package of components that are built to manage virtualized servers. OpenStack doens't actually do the virtualization. Still need KVM, Hyper-V or (gasp) ESX

meh, yes and no. there could be use cases for SMBs (more medium than small probbly), especially around app dev. if you have devs using AWS and paying for it on expense reports with taxi receipts (I've heard this happening), then a CIO could make a case for building up some internal cloud infrastructure to give users fast access to resources. I don't like the buzzwords, but DevOps could help usher in cloud adoption for regular enterprises.

The scaleability they offer is a big advantage over just having a server at a co-lo. It's not worth the money for any project I've worked on, but if you have a web-business that has the potential to become very popular, putting it in a couple of different vendor's clouds can make a lot of sense so that you can very quickly scale up to handle the traffic.

There is no such thing as a "private cloud", as the term "cloud" specifically refers to services managed by an external party, on that external party's servers. If they're your own IT staff and hardware, well then it's just your own data center.

If I want to host my own, I get VMware in my own datacenter.
If I want to host in the cloud, I buy storage+compute from AWS.
I see no reason to deploy OpenStack at a small to medium sized business. Am I just looking to get myself fired for insisting on a solution that is not VMware?

If I want to host my own, I get VMware in my own datacenter. If I want to host in the cloud, I buy storage+compute from AWS.

And you get the usual proprietary issues from both. The promise of OpenStack is that you develop in house, then push it out to whatever commodity provider(s) meet your needs at the time, x number of times in y number of locations.

It's not entirely unlike how you can assume that most any popular PHP package will run on whatever hosting provider you choose, but at the machine level instead of the app level. All the usual caveats about standards apply.

yes, this is what OpenStack does/is supposed to do. You can migrate your virtual machines, and the storage and networking infrastructure from your local datacenter, to a remote datacenter, to AWS, or Rackspace or any other openstack compliant hosting provider. In the grand sceme of this things it's really quite impressive and awesome. In reality it's still a mess, but getting better all of the time.

I'm not entirely sure what you're angling at VMware with that, but for AWS it makes more sense.

The promise of OpenStack is that you develop in house, then push it out to whatever commodity provider(s) meet your needs at the time [...snip...] [compatible] at the machine level instead of the app level.

I was under the impression that OpenStack is a management and deployment framework - it will work on top of whatever supported hypervisors are in use (KVM, Xen, VMware, etc). One would assume you won't be exposed to the majority of OpenStack's APIs and direct management systems if you're using a third-party cloud provider.

Unless you're planning your own cloud system or are looking at a deployment on the scale wher

The thing is that it's not OpenStack *or* VMWare, it's OpenStack *and* any hypervisor you like, including VMWare if you want. It's (as far as I understand, mind) an "Application Layer" above the hypervisors.

You can have OpenStack running with VMWare, XenServer, KVM, or possibly other hypervisors, if you like. Here for example is how you could setup OpenStack to use VMWare vCenter [openstack.org]. But at the moment I also have absolutely no Idea what I could user it for. My "classic" virtual machines do everything I need th

I see no reason to deploy OpenStack at a small to medium sized business. Am I just looking to get myself fired for insisting on a solution that is not VMware?

Openstack is not a VM manager. It's a cloud management system. If you want your cloud units to run in VMWare containers, OpenStack supports that. It also supports Xen, VirtualBox, several other VM hosts and Containers.

The advantage of a cloud is that you can toss stuff around without having to dedicate specific machines to them. This allows easier recovery from hardware failures as well as the ability to add nodes and capacity on-demand without having to sit down with paper and pencil and allocate physical

If I want to host my own, I get VMware in my own datacenter.
If I want to host in the cloud, I buy storage+compute from AWS.
I see no reason to deploy OpenStack at a small to medium sized business. Am I just looking to get myself fired for insisting on a solution that is not VMware?

And I would agree with you. OpenStak has the PROMISE of being a good thing for your average user, but it is FAR from being a turn-key solution. Getting OpenStack to actually do what you want it to is not something most smaller operators have time to figure out but requires someone who knows a lot about the specific VM product you want to use and the tools needed to make adjustments to your created machines.

But that really isn't a problem with OpenStack points to the purpose of OpenStack. This tool is de

In the beginning, Linux was free. I remember using it in college and learning about it and getting excited. If these big corporate players want traction against AWS and the like, they should be giving out free hosting to college students so they can tinker with it too.

In the beginning, Linux was free. I remember using it in college and learning about it and getting excited. If these big corporate players want traction against AWS and the like, they should be giving out free hosting to college students so they can tinker with it too.

...that right now, in the midst of the NSA security nightmare and all the angst and FUD it's causing, that people are wondering why individuals are not deciding to throw their often-sensitive data into the cloud.

how could anyone think their data will be or stay safe, given the various threats that we hear about on almost a daily basis?

timing is everything (besides location of course...and sex appeal...and everything else) in life, and right now is not the time for cloud computing.

...that right now, in the midst of the NSA security nightmare and all the angst and FUD it's causing, that people are wondering why individuals are not deciding to throw their often-sensitive data into the cloud.

how could anyone think their data will be or stay safe, given the various threats that we hear about on almost a daily basis?

timing is everything (besides location of course...and sex appeal...and everything else) in life, and right now is not the time for cloud computing.

And you think, based on the revelations you've read, that your often-sensitive data is safer in a closet in your office? It's still accessible over the internet, and your CEO still logs in from any old airport wi-fi or coffee shop using his malware-riddled DELL.

I don't worry about Amazon, China, or the NSA sifting through my databases at night, because given the state of the State I don't think we can do much to stop them. I DO worry about power failures, water pipe bursts, exploding UPS batteries, dust, an

...until upstream bandwidth in the USA catches up with the rest of the world, self-hosted "clouds" like this are just not happening. Sure, you can colocate a server, but that's expensive for a SMB and you can spend that same money on a bigger Internet pipe instead, but with such cheap turn-key on-demand scaling services like EC2, why set up your own?

Hell, lets even ignore all that. What would I, as an end user, use OpenStack for? I'm sincerely asking: what is the use case for an end user directly using OpenStack?

That, I think is the answer to TFA's question. You shouldn't. That's for the DevOps people to worry about.

As an end user, you shouldn't have to care what the data center underpinnings are. And for personal systems, the standardized images of cloud systems aren't much use. Although if you're running a call center or some other group where lots of people are running essentially identical systems, they're a better candidate for commodity virtual hosting.

The problem with OpenStack is that the only part of it that is actually open and free is DevStack, which is fine for tinkering but isn't suitable for actual deployment. Of course, for an actual deployment solution, you have to pay these vendors $$$$ at which point you might as well just pay Amazon $$$$ and get better service.

1. Large chunks of it are "just" API's with no implementation behind them. I recently had someone say we should use OpenStack because it had Cinder and we needed block storage. I had to point out that doesn't really help unless they want to pay for a Cinder backend, or develop their own.

2. It's horrifically complicated. I used to work for HP Cloud Services: HP's public cloud. I was there when Biri decided to use OpenStack. I saw the huge pain even they went thr

They use the 'linux' analogy - but that analogy doesn't hold. When linux was in its infancy, there were many people running linux on their own box. And slowly it got better, and got ready for (first) development, and later even for production sites. Compare that to OpenStack. Yes, of course you can run it on 2-3 dev boxes, but it really isn't usefull for anyone except really big companies. And those companies don't care too much about the price of VMWare or similar - they care about the cost of administrato

There's many more OpenStack users and operators than you think. OpenStack is good for small cloud vendors, people that want to run a private, in-house cloud. It's good for Universities that want to teach Cloud computing, or enthusiests that want to try setting up their own private cloud for toying with.

OpenStack holds a summit every 6 months. This last one (just last week) had over 3500 people in attendence - developers from those sponsoring it, operators, and user; and they were talking about how phenominal the growth has been - the first from what I heard had like 500 people.

So while you may want to use AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Compute for a non-managed, public cloud; if you want to do something in-house, you have fewer choices. VMware certainly has their offering; but it also comes at a high price (yes, I've looked at it in the past). I'm not sure where the various hypervisor support is, but I do know they use KVM and have the ability to use others (Rackspace uses Xen, others use VMware or Windows HyperV if I am not mistaken; at the very least there's discussion on it).

Now, I wouldn't expect high growth for OpenStack. Why? It's a big budget item to run in-house, and most are probably not going to market they use it. If people are not devoting a lot of money up-front to run it, they may be testing and slowly rolling it out as resources allow. And yes, you can run it from the SMB level to the Enterprise level.

Disclaimer: I work for Rackspace; I've got a few servers that I may try to install OpenStack on to play with myself as well.

Is what the summary aludes to: 95% of the people I see who are 'in' Openstack are not users, but people assigned by vendor 'X' to make sure that vendor 'X' is not rendered irrelevant. A large chunk of the resource behind openstack verges on technical marketing rather than development.

I see this as more worrisome than the Linux case. Linux adoption was also developer heavy with few users, but developers with genuine passion were on it. Here we have an ecosystem of vendors that is fearful of 'the next linu

No, it isn't. A bunch of incompetently integrated systems that require lots of effort to put into a state suitable for students and to keep in that state? Speaking as someone who has actually written a course on cloud computing, no thanks. The students can get free time on one of the big providers instead and learn everything they need, and those providers actually try really hard to make things work. (The free allocations tend to be fairly small, but they're enough for learning basic principles.)

Linux got adopted in the enterprise because it already had an existence elsewhere, bourne
out of frustration of failing proprietary software, lock in, closed cultures, fuck-over-ism, etc.
(MS are you listening?) The techies injected their own culture, knowledge and the need
for Linux into the corporations organically (no doubt this amounted to a revolution).

Cloud computing on the other hand is the answer to a non-exsitent problem. It's a coporate
hype. Adopters are those that've got their heads not in

Absolutely! But there are cases where IaaS is useful. Combining IaaS with docker by way of something like OpenShift (RedHat's PaaS) is very powerful. I think that is the direction that everything will go. OpenStack will be there, but a bit more hidden. People will use higher level API to handle deployment of their apps. OpenStack is just the API to build those higher level services. That means that something like OpenStack is still needed. That also means that hardware that works with OpenStack is very usef

I'm not sure what they mean by "end users". I've been keeping an eye on OpenStack, and it seems to be useful for developing cloud applications, but I might be missing the point a little. So are we calling developers of large-scale applications "end users"?

I don't think people are ignoring it, but as far as I know, OpenStack doesn't really service your standard network IT market yet, and it's not really something that will service "end users" as I think of them. It seems to be something to provide scalability for development, but if you're a developer working on a large application, it's often smarter to go with a vendor rather than trying to build your own infrastructure. That means that they go with AWS or Rackspace or something.

So my question is, who do you expect to be implementing OpenStack other than cloud providers (e.g. Rackspace) and a relatively small number of companies looking to build their own cloud infrastructure?

As an IT guy (not a developer), the whole thing is still pretty unclear. What would I use OpenStack for? If I wanted to test it out, what would I need to get started? How would I set it up? What, then could I do with it? Most of the appeal of "the cloud" at this point is the potential to divest myself of responsibility for its maintenance. The only people that I can imagine making use of OpenStack are large companies with large public, business critical web applications, and even then only those who, for whatever reason, don't want to use AWS or Rackspace or some other vendor, and have the resources to build and maintain a bunch of cloud infrastructure. Yes, there are businesses that fit that description, but it's not a large percentage of businesses.

Sure, but you're still talking about development. Like I said, I'm not a developer, just an IT guy. What am I going to use it for?

Most companies don't run on web development. Even when they have a considerable network, the network is providing authentication/directory services (e.g. Active Directory), DNS, DHCP, file services, and maybe a few relatively small server-side apps (e.g. Quickbooks). How does OpenStack help me with any of that? Can I deploy or manage those services better or easier than set

To really make use of the cloud, don't put traditional apps on it. It is not designed to run things like MS Exchange.

If you work in a software development shop, especially a web app, then cloud is awesome. Think of cloud as an API. That is where the real power is!

We have a continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline. The entire deployment is described in software using Amazon's API. We abstract our infrastructure as code so we can replace it with Openstack if we need to. Amazon's API far ahead of anything else out there, so right now we don't really need to switch. This system is extremely powerful. We can bring up entire testing environments the the execution of a script. In system configuration is driven with Chef, but even some of those scripts use the Amazon API to help discover information about the environment.

VMWare provides some of the features, but nothing like Amazon offers. VMWare is also designed for a traditional IT cycle where you can about running a VM for more than a year. Cloud thinking makes more using of disposable nodes. A machine may not last a month because it is replaced with an entirely new image.

So, IF you write software correctly, having an in-house cloud API is extremely useful. Having a cloud API that a standard is also very useful. Start small with a public provider (Rackspace), then bring in-house as the business grows (RedHat Openstack). When the business needs somethings more elastic, that same API can be used with third party providers to supply the computing when it is demanded (Rackspace).

Having played with OpenStack for a couple of weeks, the overriding impression I got from it is that it is made by vendors, for vendors.

You can download and do most stuff advertised, but it takes a LOT of learning and work, UNLESS you pay a vendor for their bolt-on to make the management of it easier. What a surprise, most of these vendors are the developers. It's therefore in their best interests to make it difficult to setup.

What tipped me away from it was that once you have it setup, it is also going to

This whole cloud thing will blow over. As someone already noted, if you replace "cloud" with "other people's servers" it sounds a lot less appealing and a lot less manageable.Do you want to outsource your outsourced infrastructure to a bunch of head-wobblers?

Well I have, and even with RedHat's documentation and distribution, it's nothing short of a nightmare.

It took me a good part of a day to subscribe to RedHat's evaluation distribution, and configure maybe 2 out of the 7 or so daemons that are needed to get it to all hang together.... and this was starting from scratch with no idea how the open stack architecture hangs together. In fact, I'm still a bit fuzzy on the details.

Compare that with a vmware ESXi install. Within an hour or so, you're running linux in a VM.

For a contractor going into an organization trying to sell this, it's very very hard. Skilled people in Open stack are few. I can't easily set something up in Open Stack and then walk away, or the customer is in a lurch for support. The technology needs to be well supported and well understood with a community of techs.

At the moment, while I love open source and everything you can do with it, a typical organization would rather go with vmware due to it's ease of use and the number of techs that can manipulate it. Yes it costs a fortune, but it's worth paying because it's easier to support, and these enterprises have money for this.

Openstack is going to go great guns where in-house techs can deploy it for customers, and spend all the time in the world to learn it's ins and outs....but for everyone else it's too much hassle.The comparisons with earlier version of Linux are apt. Just as enterprises don't want to roll their own Linux kernel, much less do enterprises want to hand configure their own cloud.

There will be a market for preconfigured & value-added open stack environments however. It's just too early to call yet.

It's like they're trying to be old sysadmins and naming their boxes after their favorite pokemon until they run out of names and start using Star Trek episode names midway through. No context in the names so you can't figure out what anything does without a reference.

That said, I've looked at it several times because of the things it might do for me that

I've tried to install OpenStack on a small group of 4 machines (a controller, a network manager and two compute node). It was a real mess to install. The documentation contains omissions and mistakes. You need to write your own shell scripts to get the work done (and redone). Understanding what went wrong from the cryptic python debug messages is like banging your head against a wall. The only way I finally was able to test things was to scale back to a "on

The thing about OpenStack is that it has been under really heavy development for the past two years. Two years ago the product was buggy as hell. But they've made a series of 6-monthly releases since then. Each one of which offered substantial improvements. Its now pretty good and stable. There is really a incredible support for it. I heard of numbers of around 2000 developers so each release really is substantially better than the previous.